During our last STEAM program in this series, we showed the kids the difference between a sweet potato and a yam:
Yams are the tubers of lily plants that are native to Asia and Africa.
A yam like the one shown on the left can weigh 3-4 pounds! Their skin is rough and bark like. I bought one in a local international food store--it was imported from Ghana
Sweet potatoes are really just a kind of potato--or kinds,since there are several including "white" sweet potatoes. And they are native to the Americas.
African slaves saw the sweet potatoes growing here and used them the way they were accustomed to using yams. And they called them "nyami." Hence us calling them yams.
I let the kids handle the yam and the sweet potatoes. And then we gave them cut up sweet potatoes, mushrooms and other vegetables, paper and paint and let them make art with them:
There are a lot of variations in what they did. Older kids might get the idea of potato printing to form a constant design, but our kids were a lot more freeform. They used the vegetables in some cases the same way that they would have used paintbrushes. The celery leaves were especially good for using in a brush like way. I was glad that no one decided to try paint flinging--we've had that before, and it would have been a mess to clean up!
These first two examples were done by the older kids in our group--which for us, means somewhere between 5 and 7.
This was done by one of our 3 year olds. It looks like all he did was smear paint, but he actually stamped the paper first with the various veggies. And THEN he smeared the paint!
We also talked a bit about apples. I showed the kids the bottom of the apples. If you look carefully, most apples have a dried bit of stuff at the base, which is the remnants of their flower. We looked a little bit at a book about apples, and talked about the different varieties.
While the kids were doing paint art, I was making applesauce. They'd each sliced an apple and then I tossed them in the microwave with a little water. It takes about 15-20 minutes for the apples to soften into sauce, especially if you are using a low power microwave--and I was.
Then we put them through a food mill--and this makes the applesauce smooth and pink!
If you'd like to see the whole process, there's a post about it
HERE on my cooking blog.
The kids got to take some home--in tiny plastic containers, so they each got a small sample.
That's all the STEAM for now. More in JanuaryQ